Current Forum: Session 4: Ideology and Race	Read 8 times 	
Date: 05-Feb-2001 23:45:53	
Author: MCKAHAN, JASON G. <jgm8530@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Race, class and gender in Imitation 	
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       Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life explores the intersectionality of race and gender, while undermining class implications of race. The film, as Selig notes, works under a Sirkian system, 
which establishes a position from which the viewer might evaluate the character’s actions, and judge their social determination (Wide Angle 10 [4] [1988] 13-23). Rather than the accumulation of conflict through individuals, social conflict becomes the protagonistic force. First, the spectator 
participates in a dialogue concerning social class and femininity. Both Annie and Lora are single mothers, who try to raise their daughters in a precarious job market and sexist society. Yet, race also becomes a dominant topic when relating Annie and Sara Jane’s relation to Lora and Susie. Annie takes the maternal place of Lora, so that Lora is in a “liberated” position to seek her own success. Sara Jane tries to “pass” for a white girl and Lora represents exactly what it means for Sara Jane to be a white woman.
       The four opening shots (wide to tight) exaggerate the expanse of Coney Island, slowly gazing in on the ankles of Lora, who has lost her daughter, Susie. When Lora finds Susie with Sara Jane she supposes Susie has met a “white” age-mate and assumes that Annie is her mammy. But when Lora finds out that Sara Jane is Annie’s daughter, her shock is represented through a shift from two-shot (union) to shot-reverse shot (division). Omi and Winant argue that race often works on such terms of misrecognition, because the social construction of race allows 
for gaps in the constructed “color line” of signifiers, which in turn becomes the locus of perplexity. Thus, racial categories fail to neatly symbolize and signify social interests by 
reference to human bodies; hereditary racialism is questioned. 
       This misrecognition recurs in sexual relations when Sara Jane tells Susie that she has a boyfriend and Susie asks if her boyfriend is “colored.” When Annie goes to Sarah Jane’s hotel 
room, she is forced to act out the assumptions of blackness in front of Sara Jane’s friend, by playing the mammy. A revolt against this misrecognition occurs when Sara Jane plays the part 
of a domestic servant in front of Lora and her guests. 
       Annie’s social class seems to get little attention in the film. Heung notes that Sirk suppresses Annie’s class conflict by shifting the emphasis to race (Cinema Journal 26 [3] [1987] 21-43). Therefore, while Annie and Sara Jane’s problem with intergenerational blackness emerges often in the film, the spectator is rarely (with the exception of Sara Jane’s commentary) asked to address the position Annie must assume under Lora in a servant/served system. Friendship becomes the bond that is undercut by a verbal agreement with “no wages.” “Anna dies, more or less because of her daughter’s treatment of her, not because of the innumerable hardships suffered by domestics” (Heung 30). Finally, Sirk fails to admit the construction of race in what becomes a theological question: Annie says, “The Lord had his reasons for making some of us white and some of us black,” a notion which removes racial conflict from the material world that informs the category of “race”.
       The ideological function of Imitation of Life is to subvert notions of the professional woman by making women’s work an imitation of life. Lana’s career can only come at the cost of 
alienating Susie, who falls into an Oedipal infatuation with Steve; Sara Jane’s identity and work kills Annie. Sara Jane’s trajectory is parallel with that of Lora. Like Lora, to be within white femininity, is to masquerade a construct of gender within white phallocentric logic.